Wednesday, July 19, 2017

beer column

From On the Coast on Tuesday:

Just when you think you’ve got a handle on craft beer,
another brewery opens up, another style becomes popular or a new trend pops
up.

Mariner Brewing is poised to open on the Barnet Highway in
Coquitlam in August. I understand it
will have a 50 person tasting room and a steam-powered brewery. So watch social media for the opening
announcement!

One potential new trend is hop powder. I’m not hearing a lot about
it in Vancouver yet, but there are some breweries in the US who are
experimenting with it, including Georgetown Brewing in Seattle.

Hop powder is pretty much what it sounds like – it is a
powdered form of hops. The powder is an
essential oil-rich concentrate made by extracting resin glands from the hops at
very cold temperatures in a nitrogen atmosphere to preserve the quality of the
oils. The resulting powder contains
twice the percentage of alpha acids – which is what bitters beer - as the
original hops or the pellets they might otherwise have been converted into, twice
as many essential oils, and it also costs twice as much.

For brewers, using hop powder means that less liquid is
absorbed by the green matter during dry hopping, so there’s more beer in every
batch, which may offset the extra price.
Those who have been experimenting with the powder say that it gives
incredible aroma to the beers.

For consumers though, it hasn’t
been around long enough to know if can retain aroma stability as cans
and bottles age on shelves.

It will be
interesting to watch this product develop – to see if it lives up to the early
hype and changes the industry, or if it’s just too expensive for most
breweries.

And then there’s raw ale.

Raw ale is the
resulting beer when the wort is not boiled.
Most traditional farmhouse ales are raw and probably prehistoric beer
was all raw ale.

In what is now the normal course of making beer, the wort,
which is the sugary liquid extracted from the malted grains, is boiled. Boiling has three purposes – 1. To sterilize
the wort so that it doesn’t get infected with unwanted bacteria; 2. extracting the acids in the hops to bitter the
flavour (which also helps in protecting against infection) and 3. removing protein from the beer, which
improves flavour stability.

So if you’re not
boiling the wort, how can you achieve those three things?

The first issue is
sterilization. The mashing process
pasteurizes the wort, so no worries there.
Mashing is the initial step in brewing where the starches in the grains
are converted into fermentable sugars by being steeped in hot water. So long as the steeping lasts long enough at
a high enough temperature, the wort is pasteurized.

The second issue was extracting the hop oils. There are several other ways to get hop
bitterness than boiling the hops in the wort.
You can boil the hops into a tea and add that to the wort, or you could
pour nearly boiling wort over the hops.

The third issue though, removal of protein, requires
boiling. So raw ales tend to have short
shelf lives.

I’ve never knowingly
had a raw ale before, and everything I’ve read on the subject just says you’ll have
to taste the difference yourself. I understand most of the difference is mouthfeel.

There is no one style of beer that is raw, it is the
non-boiling brewing method that makes it raw, rather than a beer style.

Category 12 has made a raw ale, and I took one in to the studio to taste.

It is a Westcoast farmhouse ale - a Scandinavian inspired farmhouse ale,
with the addition of west coast red cedar.
It is fermented for two months with Brettanomyces yeast, then refermented
for a month in the bottle.

It is crisp, light, and complex. It is also very hazy as all those proteins
remain in the beer, and it hasn’t been filtered.

The flavours we can attribute to the Brettanomyces yeast are
the funkiness, that bit of tartness, along with some spice, all that great stone-fruit, and acetic acid
(the main ingredient in vinegar).

Gloria Macarenko and I both really enjoyed the beer. I'm interested to try more raw ales so I can get a better handle on just how not boiling the beer changes the mouthfeel.

This is a limited edition beer, so if you’re interested to
try it, get out there right now and get some!
Available in 750 ml bottles at private liquor stores.

Beer Picks:

My beer picks this time are some very tasty summer beers:

Hoyne Brewing’s Carte Blanche White IPA – this is a
well-balanced hazy white ipa with tropical fruit flavours and aromas. Wheat, melon, passionfruit and grapefruit
flavours mellow into a slightly bitter finish.
This is the first in a series of limited release beers where brewmaster Sean
Hoyne passes the torch to the younger brewers to brew the beers they want to
see in the world.

6%. Available in
650ml bottles at specialty liquor stores – but hurry, this was a limited
release!

Doan’s Craft Brewing Lucinda Cassis Kolsch – Part of their
Fun Times series, this is a collaboration with Odd Society Distilling. It
is a blend of Doan’s kolsch beer and Odd Society’s cassis. Very light,
and berry-y! The fruit, hint of wine and tartness from the cassis balance
and play with the malt character of the kolsch.

5%. Available on tap at Doan’s and Odd Society, and in
650 ml bottles. Also a limited release, so get it now if you’re wanting
to try it!

Off the Rail Passionfruit Hefeweisen – This is a hefeweisen for people who don’t normally like
hefeweisen! It begins its life as a traditional hefeweisen, with Bavarian
wheat and hints of clove and banana. Then it is infused with
passionfruit. Crisp and hazy, it’s a perfect summer sipper.

About Me

i didn't always love beer - there was a time in the distant past where i just didn't have a taste for it. fortunately my taste buds changed and my love affair with beer began. slowly at first, eventually blowing itself up into my current obsession with all things beer. i enjoy drinking beer, but i also enjoy reading about beer, talking about beer, thinking about beer and one day soon will actually brew something worth bragging about. my overwhelming beer obsession is hops - love them, can't get enough of them, grow them! you can hear me wax poetic about beer every second tuesday at 5:50 p.m. on cbc radio one's on the coast with stephen quinn (88.1 fm in vancouver and 690 am).